1) Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a question and answer system for providing results to requests.
2) Discussion of Related Art
Search engines are often used to identify remote websites that may be of interest to a user. A user at a user computer system types a request into a user interface and transmits the request to the search engine. The search engine has a data store that holds content regarding the remote websites. The search engine obtains the content of the remote websites by periodically crawling the Internet. The data store of the search engine includes a corpus of documents that can be used for results that the search engine then transmits back to the user computer system in response to the request.
It has become common for users to request answers to questions. Regular search engines are not suitable for providing answers to questions. The online system of a search engine typically does not have the architecture that allows for quick processing of questions and extraction of answers. A crawler of a regular search engine crawls data from arbitrary websites that do not necessarily relate to questions that are being answered. Certain questions may also be updated faster than others. Not being able to process what a question means or of what type the question is also makes regular search engines ineffective for providing answers to questions.